Group photography is a challenging genre of photography. For group shots, photographers desire to have all of the faces aligned with one another (preferably, looking into the camera or in the same direction), consistent smiles/expressions, and open eyes. Since it is difficult to capture pictures of groups of people having these or other desirable facial features, photographers frequently engage in tedious manual photo manipulations to create such images. For example, a professional photographer may shoot short clips to capture fleeting moments when people are arranging themselves. The professional photographer then reviews these clips to manually identify the best frame to use as the group photo and may attempt to manually correct issues in that image.
Conventional photo editing applications do not adequately facilitate such selections and corrections of group shots. Where the clip includes more than a few frames, there is no way to present the user with all of the frames for visual comparison with one another. Users are generally left to select from a small subset of a potentially larger set of frames from a clip. Users also generally end up making subjective guesses about which frame is best based on observing a one or a few attributes in a few of the frames and are unable to objectively compare all frames with respect to multiple, relevant attributes. In addition, there is often no one frame of a clip where all of the desirable attributes are present for all of the faces. The photographer must then manually tweak the facial features (eyes, smiles, face orientation, etc.) of each face. Existing systems do not facilitate the use of features found in the faces in other frames and instead rely upon the photograph's sophistication and ability to perform subjective and manual revisions. Existing systems thus generally require that the user perform processes that are manual, subjective, and tedious, that often require sophisticated knowledge of photo editing tools, and that often provide unsatisfactory results.